Tea at Trianon: Political Changes Wrought by the 'Black Death'

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Friday, July 10, 2020

Political Changes Wrought by the 'Black Death'

From Phys.org:

In areas where Black Death mortality was not particularly high, agricultural elites had the capacity to respond to minor labor shortages by doubling down on coercion. Rather than opening the labor market, they maintained the strictures of serfdom for a longer period of time. As a long-term consequence, ownership of land remained highly unequal well into the 19th century, and we saw elite-dominated politics instead of more participatory political institutions. At the dawn of mass politics, this meant that voters acted more deferentially, voting for political parties, in particular Imperial Germany's Conservative Party, that the traditional agrarian elite preferred and directed them to vote for. (Read more.)